2 Answers
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\bigl declares an opening math delimiter with less horizontal spacing than the unspecified \big. \bigr defines a closing math delimiter. Using a \bigl and \bigr pair you could get the brackets or parentheses closer to the term within.

You can see the difference in the following example. The left modifiers \bigl etc. are basically \mathopen{}\big. You also have to use \mathopen if you are using \left and \right to do automatic scaling to get correct spacing in some cases.